Hamilton Stone Review #24
PoetryRoger Mitchell, Poetry Editor
Laura Carter
Breaking Crystal
Can this center with its eyes on home
be a new kind of admiration?
Rose-and-lily, pine-and-black-sparrow-and-floridly
loose at the vest-of-no, loose at the yes-vest—
I move my body into a new constellation, and then, and
then. Wrong answers round off to laterals. I kiss
the painting on the bridge & then erase the bridge from the book.
For a time
a pig gut hypothesis is dressed in cues of orange....
The pig wants his slop, and ants
weave lattices from bishoprics, mosques
from lilacs, paragraphs from the number for Twelve
Frames. It's not enough of anything, but it's something greater—
Danae at the bank.
Platform of linearity put on slowly like a wedding gown.
Sheaves of gray books in the window.
Accustomed to speaking of violets
the bare-speaking bear took a last punch.
Someone pirouetted in acts,
done up around the waist like
a shimmering iridescent ballgown. What comeliness in the fire-eater!
As a close space
is a new kind of
kind, a bell-shaped curve of light,
the manuals for mimesis plunder
stolidness from the mine....
Only a few observe the intuited platinumscape—
the voices of lovers in epics,
rooftop howlers and anodynes,
slumbering starfish,
sweet stars.
Brocade
Waiting on the moon
beside the cat's-eye sea
at tintype of now
the girl in quiet stealth.
In the barn the gaze and the voice
the prattle of the screen
$2 bottles of
doors and folds
one more holding-closer moment
lilies and a camera. Orchids.
The record's groove is up
singing Bruce Springsteen before dawn.
A rhizome
a series of questions.
Waiting on the moon is the girl.
The brocade of her skirt tussles.
So much for an old heaven....
The book unfinished; so, je t'aime.
Waiting on the moon....
Ambient line of action,
a photographic "reason" or
a tangential theory.
Don't look at light.
It's what's seen through: here.
Campo Campagne Afterlife Phobia
Becoming grieving not becoming grieving mourning
hint of blush in cheeks it's ok to swoon with it to listen with it
no way to know the answer in the future any-
way it's never imprecise
never quite precise either
the feeling of of
the corner of the century pulled away from itself
made into sand and sea
made into the circle of fifths the circle of sevenths
no more writing fourteeners no more drinking coffee
or putting on the stilts looking up
at the beginning of the alphabet kissing on the floor of
the X in the center of the circle the Y
the song is its own severance of nines becoming song becoming two
as what's ordinary
opens the door
of the universal; I'm interested in caesuras
now; I want to be
becoming open becoming platinum become
he said and I said back that I'm open to innovation
the cunning of clever pulled away
blanket over grey
replace the knife
with the key to the century; replace the
caesuras with the dawn fit of tendons
and at the airport a fit of tension
moving like a diary past the song
he said I was there for the wrong reason; loaded up in tight eights
hill of the ocular
psyche-soma cut the wrong dream
space in vascular; space is vascular; cuts
on the plate like the country forgotten or
conscious of the bridge on which the blood stays...
replace the air with water
intensity spooling in joyous
eyes of light can't stay pockets can't stay thimbles or
perforated sixes cruising down the highway
as thin as fire
as thin as Heraclitus arguing
he said I was going for the jugular
then I was reading for the differential
I replaced the knife with the abstract and piano music
plays slowly over the talk of restraint—
I know what you mean I am working too
Ken Champion
Usherettes
Some serve in a churchlike Athens Odeon, an act of observance
and Greek dubbing, others in Sao Paulo's Una Banco pimping
ice cream while waiters tout margaritas, and a Tangier picture
palace where the audience shouts, look behind you! to the hero
comfort refugees in a shell-pocked art house in Beirut, watch
contraband movies in an Art Deco theater amongst Havana
palms, fight off the manager of a Roxy in Taiwan.
They've heard the roar of light hit the screen, ping of a bra
strap from the back row, watched a lit match passed like
an Olympic flame across red velvet seats, cigarette smoke
floating into bas-reliefs and chevrons; torch beams gliding
over carpets they are ciphers guiding us into the lit city,
the mansion, bedrooms, bars.
There's one now, next to my aisle seat, raised knee flicking
off a shoe, leaning back on the curtained wall, unlit torch
idly hanging, the world at 24 frames a second in her eyes.
William Ford
Helmets
....done with my schoolwork, I commence
My real life: my arsenal, my workshop
Opens, and in impotent omnipotence
I put on the helmet and breastplate....
—Randall Jarrell
1. The Russian Tanker at Camano Island, 1947
We watched acetylene torches
cut it down and barge after barge
leave for the yards of Seattle
in the tug-dragged night.
It had been out there for years
sunk to the prop in muck
no one could walk through
before the tide turned
and the rumored Great White
emptied the bay of us.
With binoculars we could see
gun mounts pointing at the sky
and letters on the stern
none of us could understand.
Though our parents said no,
we wouldn't believe that a Jap
torpedo hadn't made the hit
and somewhere in the Sound
Fishing off the point
we'd find their little fishing floats
and bits of hand-woven net,
our lines deep enough for midget subs.
At night until the very end,
I'd swear its blinker light
was sending Allied code.
2. Computer Flight Simulator
I bank left and nose just above
where the Zero fighter will climb
into the cannon rounds
of my Hornet F-16 and explode--
stick light but firm,
like holding a woman's breast,
said Russell Baker, himself
a stateside only rookie
training against the Axis.
Two more and I'll be an ace.
Four-F in the eyes when my turn came
I became a rifle-totting typist
against the Reds.
Mud-spattered and obscene,
I was angry at God for denying me
access to the heavens, where
killing's clean and you fly home
every night to a cheeseburger,
Playboy, and a warm bed.
Joystick in hand, I toggle
into the sky, my screen mottled
with North African desert
or clotted with jungle
from Guadalcanal.
The Hornet's an eighties craft,
Mach 3 in a pinch, ten times
faster than Zero or Messerschmitt.
It's unfair, I know, using present tech
to defeat the past but when I fly
the old P-40 I go down in flames.
Losing Robert Dana
Poet Laureate of Iowa, 2004-2008
The T.V. crew has had to wait because
under that hat, somewhere, he is there
teasing a little cobble with his cane,
a hint of swagger in the old manner.
They had wished for more.
The camera tried and tried to widen his grin
yet hold that goatee a dagger,
but nothing would stay.
Now they watch
the evening spread into the sea
hoping maybe for a little
of that old wine darkness
though it's Florida, Bob's
other paradise, and the water's
warm and pearly and loudly green.
In Iowa if not Boston or New York,
it will all be used against his death,
an hour's monument
hosted by a notable voice
and the makers of "America's best"
while the prairie plays with its hair.
Hugh Fox
The Closer
The closer the (beginning) better, back to
essential eyeness, skinness, taste and stretch-
outness, loving the older brick downtown towns,
redone (a little), but better out facing the Whatevers
redoing the everyday in all the best wind-rain-sun-moon
ways, not in Tsunami territory, playing games with
the coast-sea gods, but here re-Potawatomie-ing, and
then let in the unbeastly gringo former beasts becoming
one tribe with my greatest grandparents leaning on a bit
of their wilderness not just to survive but thrive in a
togetherness of daylight savings and losings, dyings
and rebirthings all part of same cosmic messages that
never cease to grandeur us.
Body
Who needs/wants a body, talking to
the Transformation Department at MIT
about making me just brain, eyes, ears,
maybe nose...and float me around back
to my old Seine-Moldau-Porteño places,
maybe Stravinsky and Coco Chanel tonight,
tomorrow Oedipus, then a little Candide,
the Retired Living Whorehouse in Highland
Park just to look at aging cathedral tits and eyes.
Jeff Gundy
The Foreigner Attempts to Master Nonfiction Narrative
When the soul gets tapped it gushes forth--but is the tapped soul
like a thawed waterfall? Like the grain behind the false wall
in The Long Winter, grimmest of the Little House books?
Here are the lopsided fruits of grief: a wooden shower stall
and a three-toed sloth. What lie is more self-indulgent
than a sentence beginning "To be very honest"? And facts,
facts just muddy up the story, which is yours after all.
Say "I imagined," and you can say any damn thing.
Comparison is fundamental and useless. One must ferry
readers toward the epiphany, then dump them out of the boat.
I had a free house, though I hated it, and access to a messy
but massive archive. The minotaur did not reveal himself.
All this I, I, I may seem myopic, but these fine, paranoiac particles
persist, as does my yearning for salt, grease, stray factoids,
and the words written on back of the scratch paper.
White canes can be mailed free. Scorpions must be sent
by surface mail. Bearded dragons may be freely transported
through Detroit, but print and sign the form for the convenience
of the border guards. The novel began in the city, with the problem
of life in such close quarters. I am trying now to be grateful
for wretched excess, for the abundance of blizzards. I have
good folders labeled Doubt and Belief, but items keep shifting
between them, or into the third folder, which will hold no label.
So much that once glowed seems dull today; still, a window
of free water glints below the bridge. When seeking the portage,
I learned, the secret is to find the place where the water moves.
Prints
Any list I can make will be a joke. Woodpecker, though, mosquitos,
violets and columbine blooming, the idling creek.
Halfway across the swinging bridge, I slowed to let it settle.
Nurse log, home to mosses and a few thin weeds, a family of those
brilliant tiny round red bugs, a black spider that ran straight at
me when I spooked it.
The way the far bank shoulders up, allowing the roots purchase and
the trunks to poke upward.
All this instead of rock and methane frozen into durable mush, instead
of hard vacuum, neutrinos, enormous furnaces.
Not instead: in addition.
The tentative way of the black and orange butterfly, inches from my
sweaty knee.
So many bodies, the wet god whispers, so much to love, to fear, to lose.
I am a disturbance here, but not an absence.
If I want I can sing as loud as any cardinal.
I always start out too fast and too loud.
A raccoon's been down at the shoreline, left its infant traces behind.
Not much changes. Everything moves.
Late sun on the warm creek-skin: a soft jewel, never to be mined.
Robinson Goes Around Again
"[E. A. Robinson] wrote Amy Lowell that at the age of six he
sat in a rocking chair and wondered why he had been born."
—Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry
He leaned out the window, feeling like his skin
was inside out. Get a room somebody yelled
but though he craned and peered he couldn't see
who was doing what. He exhaled and went back
to the rocking chair, moved some damp underwear.
The dryer belt had snapped again, it was four flights
down to the laundromat, and the whole place
was damp as the cracked tiles behind the toilet.
Maggie would be off work at five, hungry and tired.
The thought of cooking gave him a small, precise pain
between and just below his ears. He punched the remote
and watched two paunchy former stars insult a quarterback
while the same four bad clips played over and over.
At last they cut to commercial and he could let it go,
follow the fine web of cracking plaster up the wall,
across the ceiling, like a map of his interior and its roads:
crooked, in need of repair, and trailing off aimlessly
in all directions. The rocking chair didn't squeak much,
and it held him up. There was spaghetti, a can of sauce,
lettuce in a bag. Could he toast Maggie's jeans in the oven,
dance the room waving her wispy panties dry?
Was this the night she wouldn't come home at all?
It Was Snowing, and Going to Snow
Why was that girl at the door of the office, shy and shining?
I've got too many symptoms already, too many reasons
to stay home all night cruising the dumb cable, getting plump
on crackers and cheese. Who needs more drama?
Thousands of deer die every year right here in the heartland
and still they wander like heretics yearning for martyrdom.
It's just late, all my teams defeated, the lights dim and snow
threatening like the mafia all over town. I don't deserve anything
but I want two more chances, and a long holiday in Salzburg
or the south of France. If we can't protect the innocent,
how about the guilty? If you asked I might accept the tag,
dive into the ring and take your place with the grinning bruiser,
get stomped into painful pacifist righteousness. Consider
the signs and predictions, the soft and flirty forecasts
and the girl at the office door, hesitant, wanting to know
what I think. I think there's a nice little room for her
somewhere in my right brain, a bit close sometimes but warm
and snug and an easy walk downtown after the snow.
Forget hope and wish. See how the useless, lovely gift
scrunches and flattens under her tall leather boots.
Michael Hettich
The Maps
Unravel your stories like old rope until they won't hold
and your boat is set free to drift, so you only
seem at first, and you seem at first
to be only drifting. This is what the trees
might teach, the trees we've been cutting and pruning,
shaping into arguments we agree with, to fit
into the neighborhood. I don't even know
all the birds that land there, and I know just a few
of the insects. As this boat drifts further from shore
I tell the ocean many things about my life--
my family history, my various triumphs
and the moments I've turned into other creatures
without admitting anything to anyone, least of all
myself, so the ocean takes me where it will
because it doesn't notice me. And I insist it will.
But in another story our stories make the world
and then the world makes us. If you tell me how to migrate
I'll take off as the weather turns, you know I will, and fly
where I'll never be, and recognize everything
I see there, and eat that unfamiliar food.
And if you tell me I can breathe underwater
I will do that, until I can flicker and flame
like a photograph of sunlight, because this is the small tale
inside the larger story and the larger story's memorized
so thoroughly lately we'll never swim away from it
completely, never flutter in our hollow bones away—
but we can try in small ways, and we can draw the silent maps
and follow them, and go somewhere, to practice vanishing.
Empty Sky
On the last healthy day of our lives we'll dream
backward, she insisted, and unravel all our memories
like a spun top growing smaller, back to the moment
we were born, back to the moment we were
an inevitable potential, when our parents made love,
back even farther, back before they even touched,
back when desire first awakened and the mystery
trembled between them. We call this the birth-place
of the soul, she told me, and as we leave this life,
we return there, like a cloud might return to rain.
She claimed that other cultures, cultures she preferred,
taught children to carry honey bees in their mouths
which buzzed through the winter, so when they kissed
something else happened. Their silence was not
the same as our own, though she claimed we could eat
the gestures we'd try to protect ourselves with
if we were really starving. But we're not, so we don't
live except by artifact, or someone else's story.
This is why hair grows all over our bodies
in all its tiny follicles, and why it fills with dust
or dusk when the weather is just right, and the windows
glint in the sunset that was once filled with birds
flying in small flocks just overhead
back to their rookeries, beyond this empty sky.
Daughter in the Sky
That story of a ladder found propped against the air
by a young man out walking one brisk afternoon
to clear his fuzzy head; that story of his looking up
and shaking the ladder, of climbing up a little;
the story of his telling his family what he'd found;
the story of him leading his family to that ladder--
daughter holding mother's hand, son held tight
in the young man's arms--the story of their climbing
so slowly it took all the light from the day
to get there, the little girl crying until
she found herself amazed and yearning to climb
even higher, by herself, when her parents stopped
and stepped off into a landscape of silence
to look up at the stars and their daughter, still climbing.
The story that develops, at this point, in a whole new
direction—of how that ladder fell,
which is mostly the story of the daughter, way up
against the sky, who was still just a baby,
really, although she'd learned many languages
already, whose parents spoke mostly as grass
or wind-in-the-trees now and didn't even seem
to remember her at all, though she called out, climbing
through the constellations and off across the dark
where no one could find her forever.
Rich Ives
The Horse I Rode in On
Horses have gone lame
crossing the wastelands
between two people.
--Donald Justice
Nay he says because that's who he is
a naysayer and he hasn't fallen
in love with the woman at the party
who alphabetizes the magazines on the perfectly placed coffee table
like a master pianist leaving out
the black keys' exquisite melancholy
here you can find one of the lost odes
surfacing in Shakespearean tremor and he passes by with a drink
in his available hand pointing out the finer details of
a woman's exquisite landscape the complex earthy
tones of the almost hidden peasant cart
the dark streak dipping into the rows of
clouds like a crow beaked forward
drinking snow bobbing like a child's toy
or several of them feathering down
like darker shadows of greeting but it's really
you I'm saying no to you who would have me realize
his mistakes making my life better
appearing successful I'm already painting
the picture too orderly isn't it enough to just love
someone who arranges everything one can think of
trying to nudge into place
a disorder that doesn't belong to us
someone who cries in agony at joyful midnight where
when the new year kicks the old one in the gut
someone tears open the party with the last gift of
a nice big box of disorderly experience
nay he repeats that man I've seen
who thinks he knows me not yet still
remain loose threads in eternity's burdened hem
can't you hear the silent herd of carrier pigeons
history arriving with its facts unanswered both of us in the
photograph that contained landscape so there I was holding
the evidence it isn't enough I said as we sank into
the fear destroying an entire village of innocent popcorn
the mummy coming at us again and again
unwinding diapers with an expression of
stunned restraint finally more frightened than
ours while we slipped our wine-stained
cigarband wedding rings on sleeping guilty fingers
I said no way I grabbed some air and holding on
I watched you watching and I held on
Anthony Nannetti
Intervention
So fragile yesterday,
now working the room like Ben Gazzara,
all cognizant and glad-handing.
Is it only a brother who sees the signs?
Is that my special privilege?
The sere leaf mimes your destiny:
the imminent fall to an alien earth
and the growth dependent on your falling.
Water Log
An army moves on its stomach,
but not a navy.
Tossed for a week by buffeting waves,
the readers of Travel & Leisure and I
forwent our flaming baked Alaska
and sang a halyard shanty ---
chanting "Haul away! Haul away! Haul away, Joe!"
to soothe the fractured sea.
That's the way with sailors today:
Bicardi Reserve to chase our hardtack,
gilt finery for the Captain's Ball,
and all hands on deck when the anchor falls.
Philip Byron Oakes
Extemporaneously Untitled
The synonymous with the anonymous going by Bill
to Bob's wedding at Jim's house. Dan is there with
Ann, spicy mustard in their voices. Connie thanks her
lucky stars. The camels mewl pitilessly in some distant
storybook, painting rainbows in a panorama of flannels,
putting the dowager to sleep while Charlotte laughs.
An impenetrable flock of hummingbirds taking the
shortest route to serendipity, through a narrative
passage indicting the sun for the intolerable heat.
Chuck for his chuckle. The munchkins of a tall tale
for their ascendancy to the heights of despair.
Simon Perchik
"While the sun spreading out"
While the sun spreading out
in the light from your shirt
wrung dry, its cuffs rolled back
--shores are born this way
reaching around, even here
its sleeves are still visible
and in your eyes
that first emptiness
in all directions at once :light
takes forever now
looks for you as if it
was once the only color
and nothing to end the silence
the way each night the galaxies
gather up the darkness
begin the world again
and each morning
rests at the edge, half listening
half in the open
pulling it nearer, loose
and in your arms at last.
James Valvis
Unspoken
I can still see her face,
rat snout staring out
a dark box window,
curtain pulled back, one eye
like the eye in the tell
tale heart, beady as a black
rosary, and her greasy hair
a slimy rotting dill weed,
mouth open to the O
of a constant no, she was
like an image on television
with wavy static, where
reception will almost
come in but not quite,
but you have to give her
the honesty of her hate,
the purity of her lunacy,
because when she didn't
say she loved you
she damn well meant it.